Comparison Between iPhone 3GS and the Blackberry Storm
What’s up guys and girls? I want to compare to the arguably hottest handsets out right now, the Blackberry Storm from Verizon wireless and the iPhone 3GS for AT&T.
And I know a lot of you out there are trying to make your mind up between the two handsets so this test are going to cover really a lot if different features including boot up and shut down time, typing and keyboards, photos and videos, camera and camcorder, email, their application source, browser, and screen rotations.
So, I'm going to go through and talk about specs of each device. And as I'm doing that, let me show you the shut down and boot up times of each. I turned my phone off every night and turn it on every morning so these are the time that you’ll definitely notice. These are certainly real world examples.
So, I'm trying to do these both again at the same times so let’s slide that over and hold down the power button on both. So, you can see I'm going to take both to turn down with that little sort of on the iPhone that you’re familiar with the Verizon logo on the Blackberry Storm.
Now for those of you that may have seen my Blackberry Storm review, you’ll know that I said that the devices have a lot of potential and this is one of the first that came out. Since then, there has been a ton of firmware updates and as I'll show you this Blackberry Storm is running the most recent firmware. I like to show you that just as well on the iPhone 3GS is launching or is using the launch firmware of 3.O.
Let’s turn both of them on. And the 3GS launches much faster than the iPhone 3G but certainly not nearly as quickly as the Blackberry. It’s almost instant on with Blackberry so it is very impressive with the specs of both device, dimensions of the iPhone 3GS. You’re looking at 4.5x2.4x4.8-inches so that’s the thickness.
The patch were here. For the dimensions of the Storm, you’re looking at 4.43x 2.45x.54-inches so it's just a little bit bigger. The weight of the iPhone, you got 4.76 ounces, the Storm clocks in a bit heavier at 5.47ounces. The battery life on the 3GS, you’re looking at 12 hours of talk time and 300 hours of stand by time. This is what Apple claims but the Storm, we’re only looking only at 5 and a half hours of talk time but 360 of stand by time. But in real world talk time, I mean it’s the iPhone 3GS claims to be actually well over double.
Resolutions are pretty similar. The iPhone 3GS, you’re looking at a 320x480 and the Storm 360x480. The size here are at 3.5-inches for the screen of the iPhone and for the Storm, you got 3.25-inches. The camera is 3-mega pixels on the iPhone 3GS, 3.2-inches on the Storm.
The iPhone does VGA video at three or thirty frames per second and the 3GS comes in 16 or 32-gigabyte flavors and the Storm ships with 1-gigabyte of internal storage and you can expand that with a Micro SD card.
So now we got roll of boring stuffs, let’s get to the exciting stuff and the test. So the big thing with the Storm is this sort of tactile-clicking keyboard that RIM has put in. RIM is known for research and motion, the company that made this so I just launch it and recast the music by accident there.
So the screen is nice in idea but in practice, that doesn’t actually translate so well. When you’re typing something, you have to wait for the keyboard to come back up. But it’s something that you do get use to so let’s compare the keyboards of both devices. So we’re going to Messages on each.
I'll go into messages here on the iPhone and we’ll create a new one of for both. So let’s say that I want to create a new message, we’ll make a new email. That’s fine. Okay, it’s like their feeds need to be set up. Close this.
So now, here we are at the keyboard and typing on the Storm you get two options. You get a very pearl ask sort type keyboard with two letters per and you can change it until look like a standard numeric keypad with the ABC and not in order, or you turn it on your side and take advantage of the accelerometer.
You will get a full key board, or a full QWERTY board. The iPhone has a full QWERTY portrait keyboard and also has full QWERTY landscape. So let’s do a typing comparison on each and I should preface this review by saying I am an iPhone user and I'm using an iPhone for the past few years so just natively, I'm going to have a little better accuracy with the iPhone but I do want to give you guys full disclosure.
So, I'm going to type a message sing the short type first on the Blackberry Storm and I'll just type, “Hi my name is Jon”. We’ll see how it comes out. So, my biz name is Jon, not the most accurate in the world and the short type can be a little bit difficult, and squirrelly but it does learn what you type, it doesn’t learn your words. So if your name is something different, it will react to it. And next time you’ll type, it will be more accurately.
So let’s try typing the same thing now on the iPhone keyboard which is one letter per and let’s see if we get anymore accuracy with this one. And we’ll type “Hi my name is Jon” again. So a little bit closer “Hi my name—” I edit Jon but not that. Either this is a reflection of my oval typing abilities or the keyboards on each aren’t the most accurate in landscape or in portrait.
So let’s try the landscape and see if that’s any better. So, I'll turn this over. There is the accelerometer and we will type, “Hi my name is Jon” again. We’ll see how this works. I'm going to type as fast as I can. Okay. So that was actually pretty good it is completely accurate, “Hi, my name is Jon”. And let’s try that on the iPhone. Turn that around.
So that was just as accurate as well, “Hi my name is Jon”. So in landscape keyboard-wise, I think that they are relativity close. I do prefer the keyboard on the iPhone and really that’s for one major reason.
When you hold your finger over a letter, you can see very clearly what letter you’re typing. When you’re typing a letter on the Storm, you just get a sort of blue glow and it’s hard to see where that blue glow is coming from. I would have to like to see the letter.
The short type in the clicky-keyboard, it is really going to be a matter of personal preference. I think that’s something you get use to and it is nice to actually feel like your hitting a tactile button but you have to wait for it to come back up.
So if I'm going to evaluate the keyboards completely uniquely to these devices and to try and as be un-bias as possible, I'm going to give a slight, slight edge to the iPhone just because you can see the letters that are big type and near the option for full QWERTY keyboard in both although I give you the Storm a credit, it is quite nice and relativity easy to learn and type on.
So let’s move on with our review here and let’s go to photos and videos. So we will go back to the home screen and put this back up to where it belongs. So photos and videos in managing them on the iPhone is actually relativity simple. Going to Pictures and going to Camera roll and you can view your pictures right from here. So there's a picture of my niece, you can use multi-touch to zoom in or zoom out and scroll over to the next.
And speaking of pictures and videos, here is a video of my dog. Then I can just go ahead and hit play and the videos are stored in the same place as the pictures and the video will just start playing. It’s on a vibrate right now so you won’t hear any volume.
You’ll also notice that during the video you get editing ability across the top there with the iPhone 3GS to scrub and cut. I put a video up yesterday of how to edit video. Go check that out if you’re interested.
So, we’ll stop this and that’s really how pictures are manipulated on the iPhone. Let’s take a look at how pictures and video are handled on the Storm. Let’s hit the Media button and now you get pictures. Try the music, video, ring tones, and pictures.
Since we started pictures on the iPhone, let’s start with pictures on the Storm. Go to all pictures and here are few that I just took randomly for example. Take a second to open up and there you go. If you want to zoom, this doesn’t take advantage of multi-touch pinch and zoom. Although the screen can support multi-touch, it’s not really implemented in many ways.
So if you want to zoom in I can double tap and I can zoom and pan around just as I could on the iPhone. Although I do want to show you one thing especially with the panning let’s go back to the picture of my niece and we’ll zoom in a little bit.
If you notice, that panning is much smoother on the iPhone than it is on the Storm. It’s a little bit choppy on the Storm, we’re going left and right. You can see it’s taking a while to catch up with me and it seems to go right with my finger on the iPhone. It’s like something to keep in mind. If you want to zoom out, you can double tap again. It will zoom back in because you might actually hit that down button right there and zoom out. And if you want to go back to the original configuration, it’s still zooming. It takes a while to catch up. You can hit that button and now we’re back to pictures.
You can scroll to the next one. The Storm has a little bit of bugs in it and that’s definitely one of them. You can't— there you go. The scrolling is not necessarily so smooth sometimes. When it works, it works very well. It does always were. Let’s go back to the iPhone, you keep and scroll to the next nice and easily.
So I mentioned that I would show you what version firmware I was running here on the Storm so we’re going to do that right now. So you can't see that I am running the most recent version that is available. So I'm trying to get to the main menu I'm hitting the Blackberry button. It took a few times actually to get there and we’ll go to options and a bit of about.
You can see that I'm running version 4.7.0.148 which is the most recent. Okay so let’s go back to Media and let’s take look at how the videos are angled. So we’ll go back, back and right here we are in video. I showed you how they played on the iPhone. Here’s a clip that I was pre-load here Babylon AD. I think that’s a trailer for an older movie.
So, it plays by default in landscape and let’s see if that rotates. Nope it does not. So , I'm not sure where the controls are even concepts. Hit the Blackberry button. There you go. Now you get the options. So we’ll stop that and there are the controls. It took a couple button manipulations to get them show up. We’ll go ahead and hit stop. But as you can see, our video play back is actually quite smooth on the Blackberry Storm. Okay, so we’ll go back to the main screen.
I should also say that one advantage the Storm has over the iPhone is that you do get a landscape and portrait home screens. The iPhone does not allow you to do that. All right so let’s continue with our test and let’s talk about the camerae and camcorder.
Since both are capable of taking pictures with auto-focus and recording video. So I’ve done a video dedicated just to the iPhone 3GS camcorder but I'll show you real quickly what that looks like and the camera. So you’re greeted with really a very simple option. If you want to zoom in on something while taking picture if you tap, or not zoom in but rather auto-focus, it’ll allow to focus. And if you want to switch over to camcorder, there is the little switch on the bottom right-hand corner and you flip it over and you’re recording video really is easy. Let’s take a look at the Blackberry Storm and see if it just as easy.
So we’ll go to Camera and now here we are in the Camera Application. And if I want to auto-focus on something just like it was on the iPhone, you tap it and it will auto-focus for you. And if you want to go camcorder, you hit the Blackberry button. And go to video camera, you just hit record. It is pretty simple.
So, both do have relativity capable of video recording. I will say the quality of the video that’s recorded; the audio fidelity is definitely superior on the 3GS because they can record at 30 frames per second.
So moving along, let’s talk about email. An email when you think of mobile email when you take a Blackberry, first that comes in my mind is fantastic in quality. Blackberry is bread and butter, that sounds funny. Blackberry bread and butter is email. That’s what Blackberry was known for at the debut best and the Storm is no exception. It takes advantages of RIMS really Amazing push email client. There's nothing bad that I can conceivably say about email on the Blackberry Storm. It is great, it’s fantastic, and it works well.
Email on the iPhone works relativity nicely and simply as well. There’s an email icon at the bottom. You’ll hit that. I’m going to move is out of the way so my emails don’t show up. The text just appears anyway that you like. You can have your title, who it is from and a few lines to review text. And you can also have push email as well and both are capable of talking to exchange servers. But as far as email goes, there is really nothing better than the Blackberry. The iPhone’s email client is certainly capable but it’s not as elegant as the Blackberry. It’s my opinion.
So next, let’s talk about browser and browser speed. The 3GS is equipped with 3G obviously using AT&T’s HSDPA network and the Blackberry Storm is using 3G data as well on Verizon Wireless’s EVDO Rev A. So let’s take a look at that and how quickly it loads the web pages.
Okay, so the cache has been cleared out of both these devices and we’re going to load technobuffalo.com on each and we’ll check this speed. And I turned off the Wi-Fi on the 3GS so were running just now both on cell signals and I do have five bars of AT&T and I have four bars—it cycled between four and five of EVDO Rev A so it is pretty fast. It should be irrelatively even comparison of speeds.
I should always say though that networks speed is going to vary by your location so you may get a better server with one or both of these carriers. Let’s go ahead and hit Go on both of them at the same time and we’ll see how they both do. It finishes pretty quickly. This is the simple web page. Although the 3GS renders it as you would see it on your main web browser, the Storm seems to compress it a little bit more and ignore some of the HTML spaces that we’ll put in there.
Notice that I'm zooming and using double tap and I can't zoom up out by pinching but I can do my zoom out using the zoom out button right there, the two mega fine glasses. I can zoom in using pinch in or pinch out on the iPhone and I can pan around with my finger just like I can on the Storm.
So, let’s load a little more complicated web page and see if there's any speed difference here as well. We will load in gadget.com. All right so let’s cue up I'm ready to go on both devices. Let’s hit and Go at the same time and see if there's any difference.
Well, the Storm very quickly loaded the mobile version of the site while the 3GS is being recognized as a desktop— the computer is pulling up the full version. Actually it’s been loading it pretty quickly. Although it will tell you that by comparison, EVDO rev A and the iPhone 3GS speed are very, very close. And there you go. Now, they’re both done. So, it depends on what you’re looking for.
If you want the full web version of most sites, then iPhone will give that to you. The Blackberry browser is interpreted as a mobile and will load the mobile version of most sites. You can scroll through each. You can see I can flick scroll but it doesn’t keep going when I let go of my finger. It will go just as far as I'm scrolling. The iPhone, it flicks scrolls.
So the last thing that I want to show you guys is screen rotation. I know this is a software thing. But when you do want to turn the device, you like it to turn a little bit quickly. So let’s see how that is on each. I will show you that they both work. Turn that up, see the rotation. Here’s the iPhone to rotation there and let see how they do. Then both are stood straight up.
So the Blackberry is a little bit quicker although it wasn’t turning and rotating nearly as much. It’s not always just about the same.
So guys this video did get a little long in the wind but I do want to give my overall impressions of both devices. Verizon’s network is fantastic, signal strength has been generally good wherever I go and the call quality is great. That being said, a great network I know they can overcome a very buggy device.
The Storm seen almost seems like it was rush to market. The click screen, I've had dust caught in there. You have fingernails caught in there and it does become a little bit difficult cumbersome some to use. In theory, I think its fantastic and it was a very good idea. And in implementation, I don’t think it translate it very well.
The iPhone is certainly not without its flaws. Its email client could be better. It could handle multi-tasking a little more elegantly and you could have be a little more open as far format static can read and it could have external storage which could be nice like the Blackberry Storm has.
That being said, I think the iPhone is probably a better choice of devices and this is the 3GS at least for me base on web browsing. I do a lot of work online. I am being able to have really the full internet minus flash and if you plug-ins in the palm of my hand. It is great. The multi-touch zoom really makes the iPhone stand out in my opinion.
They are both great devices and I really think it depend on your carrier. But if you have a choice to go anywhere, the iPhone 3GS is a hard one to turn away from.
Hope you enjoy. For exclusive content, you should follow me on twitter at Twitter.com/Jon4lakers. I do all kinds of giveaways and contest and you can ask me questions, and I announce live streams there and the link will be in the side bar. I hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one.
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